Quebec City's winter carnival bigger and better

Bonhomme Carnaval has been the mascot of the Quebec City winter carnival, Canada’s largest pre-Lenten celebration, since 1954 and, like the events itself, the 60-year-old has seen some ups and downs.

Merrymakers at the Quebec City winter carnival keep warm around a fire, with the ice castle in the background. The hub of the carnival, opening next Friday for three weekends, is on the Plains of Abraham.Andre Olivier Lyra

Hôtel Le Germain-Dominion in Quebec City is the embodiment of a boutique hotel. It’s petite, chic, urban and an ode to design.

Bonhomme Carnaval, mascot of the Quebec City winter carnival, Canada’s largest pre-Lenten celebration, is turning 60 this year, meaning he is old enough to pack it in and start drawing early on his Quebec Pension Plan benefits if he wants. Fat chance of that, though. Le dude Bonhomme has got his second wind.

Like the carnival itself, he has rebounded through the typical ups and downs of mid-life. Feeling underappreciated back in 2004, Bonhomme went out and joined a union — Local 503 of the Travailleurs unis de l’alimentation, affiliated with the Federation des travailleurs du Quebec. In fact, it was the two dozen men who wear the Bonhomme outfit who unionized — and who abruptly left the union two years later in 2006, unhappy with the experience.

And then came the Maclean’s affair. In 2010, Canada’s national newsmagazine put a picture of Bonhomme on its cover to illustrate a story about how Quebec was the most corrupt province in Canada. Bonhomme was depicted holding a suitcase overflowing with cash. Nobody at Maclean’s realized that Bonhomme was a trademark property of a municipal winter carnival, and not some folkloric mascot emblematic of Quebec society more broadly. Maclean’s owner, Rogers Communications, was forced to negotiate an out-of-court financial settlement with three high-priced lawyers from Heenan Blaikie representing the carnival — one from Quebec City, one from Montreal and one from Toronto.

The fact that Maclean’s didn’t realize who Bonhomme really was reflects the ongoing existence of a cultural Two Solitudes in Canada. But inside of Quebec, including English Quebec, there is no doubt who this smiling snowman mascot is, and what he represents. He is truly a beloved figure. I saw this very clearly for myself last February, during the opening weekend of the carnival, which every year spans three weekends over two weeks before Lent. This year, the carnival opens Friday and closes Feb. 16.

I was there at the opening in front of the ice castle on the Plains on the Abraham when Bonhomme was introduced on stage, and a young father to my left lifted his preschool daughter up onto his shoulders so that she could get a good look at him.

All these 12 months later, I can still see the joy and rapture on that girl’s face. Bonhomme proceeded to do a high kick with his right leg, a move he is known for, and the outdoor crowd in the -20 C degree cold let out a roar of approval.

But if Bonhomme has got his groove back, so, too, does the carnival itself, which has recovered from a slow and difficult management transition over the past decade. The overwhelming consensus now, however, among carnival competitors and travel writers, is the carnival is bigger and better than ever. It has, for one thing, been reconfigured to appeal more to families.

And I was surprised to see and hear as much English as I did, much more than I remember during my first and only other visit to the carnival in the early 1980s. I was also surprised to see so many foreign tourists.

The hub of carnival activity these days is the east end of the Plains of Abraham, up near the Citadel, where a little carnival midway is set up. At the centre of it is the ice castle, where opening and closing ceremonies are held. Around it, in all directions, are ice slides, snow sculptures, outdoor games for adults, rides for children, hot tubs popular with young adults, outdoor food kiosks, indoor tent bars, marching bands, and horse-drawn sleighs that take visitors out to the west end of the Plains, where there is a skating oval (made with artificial ice this year, for the first time) and a snowshoeing and cross-country skiing circuit.

What surprised me was just how much there is to see and do elsewhere in the city.

On the first Saturday of last year’s event, I went to the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec in the morning to see an outdoor exhibition featuring ice in architectural design, with works by students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

Later, in the afternoon, I had a choice between a David Suzuki lecture on climate change at the Musée de civilisation and an arts-and-craft demonstration of the old Quebec craft of finger-weaving at the Château Frontenac. I went to the Frontenac because I wanted to see how those iconic Quebec ceintures fléchées (arrowhead belts) are woven.

I saw a lot of out-of-province visitors — Ontario high-school kids on school trips, numerous Japanese tour groups, a group of HEC Montreal foreign students from Singapore, among others. And I heard European languages at the Frontenac I didn’t even recognize. Among the U.S. tourists I saw were a good number of young same-sex couples.

As for English, it is widely heard. The conspicuous presence of English is a throwback to 1894, the year the carnival was founded by editors of the English-language Chronicle-Telegraph, and when Quebec City had a larger anglophone population in proportional terms than Montreal does today. At the time, the Quebec City economy had been decimated by the decline of its shipbuilding industry, a byproduct of the rise of the railroad industry.

The carnival’s annual run after 1894 was periodically interrupted during the Depression years of the 1930s and ensuing Second World War. It wasn’t until 1955 that it returned for good — this time, with an iconic new mascot, Bonhomme Carnaval, front and centre.

At last year’s snow-sculpting competition, I met one of the leading competitors, Donald Watt of Yellowknife. Talking to him during one of his breaks, I noticed that the moisture on his moustache had frozen, and that little icicles were dangling from the hairs above his mouth as he spoke. The sky was a perfect blue, and the snow on the Plains a perfect white. Behind us, the Titans de Québec, a drum corps consisting of local Quebec City youth, was marching through the carnival midway, filling the cold air with warm ceremonial notes of festive cheer.

I asked Watt how he got into snow sculpting.

“When I was a little boy,” he said, “I was watching this National Film Board documentary one day on black-and-white television. It was about people in Quebec City, and how they liked to make sculptures out of snow and put them out onto their front yards. And I said to my dad, who was this big cigar-smoking guy, ‘I think I’d like to do that one day.’ And he said, ‘You can do anything you want.’ ”

And so Watt was, all these years later, fulfilling a dream. If the Quebec winter carnival is the biggest and best pre-Lenten celebration in Canada, it’s because Watt and all the other carnival competitors and visitors recognize that winter in Canada is something that can, and should, be celebrated.

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